


Beauty Like A Tightened Bow

by lanyon



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-20
Updated: 2010-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-13 21:27:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/141895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lanyon/pseuds/lanyon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The life of Cinna, from birth to the moment he meets the Mockingjay.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Beauty Like A Tightened Bow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [basking](https://archiveofourown.org/users/basking/gifts).



Cinna’s mother has always liked pretty things. Her house is full of delightful intricacies and beautiful curiosities; artwork of the look-don’t-touch variety. Cinna is very good at looking, not touching. He is very good at examining things from just the right distance, head tilted to the side, chubby toddler fingertip pressed against his mouth.

Cinna’s arrival comes as something of a surprise, both to his mother and to everyone who knows her. He is a placid infant and beautiful, too. Pregnancy is terribly wearisome and labour is dreary but her pronouncement that he is worth every drop of perspiration is greeted with sighs of relief from her husband and her parents.

Cinna’s mother dotes upon him. He has a happy childhood.

He attends school in the Capitol. His mother is happier in the Capitol. Cinna is no different than any other child. He is delicate, perhaps, prone to daydreams but one of his teachers tells him that he has a mind like a knife. Cinna does not know what to think of that. He is seven years old and he thinks that there is little beauty in a knife. It is a brutish object for cutting or carving meat. No, Cinna thinks that he prefers the arrow. There is flight and speed. There is elegance in the arrow. There is the element of surprise.

Cinna is nine years old and his brown curly hair is too long. His clothes are too pretty. He does not play any sports. He plays the piano, a relic from a long-forgotten time. He tells his mother that he looks like a girl. His mother listens carefully to his grievances which he itemises, in order of importance, standing tall (all four and a half foot) in front of her, his hands folded behind his back. He is as upright as any Peacekeeper, and solemn, his brows knitting together.

Cinna’s mother nods in all the right places and reaches for her son’s hands. He unknots them from their position at the small of his back and he looks down. His hands are tiny, even within the fine-boned grasp of his mother. There are no calluses, no scars, no bitten, ragged nails. These are the hands of the Capitol. They define nothing and they shape less. She tells him that she understands and that he is old enough to make his own decisions. Cinna’s hair is cut but he keeps the pretty clothes.

Cinna is eleven, Cinna is thirteen, Cinna is fifteen and he is comfortable in his skin. Styles in the Capitol are so fleeting and Cinna is anything but. He goes to school. He learns. As decisive as he is, he cannot settle on a single focus for his studies. He loves science. It seems to be the only truth in a world where politics initially bewilder him. He loves art. He loves design.

His mother thinks that he will be a fashion designer. She has done since, at the age of three, he told her precisely what he thought of the dress she intended to wear to a gala dinner. Cinna’s mother has learned not to disregard her son’s opinion. She is not disappointed when he attends university, hellbent on mastering the sciences. She tells him that his mind is like fire, if fire can be as disciplined as he. She tells him she will always be proud of him.

Something changes. When Cinna is seventeen, something changes. Perhaps he starts listening to the news reports, or the idle chatter of undergraduates. It happens during the 65th Hunger Games. Finnick Odair wins. Cinna has never paid undue attention to the Hunger Games. They are a blunt instrument, at best, to quell the districts, says some old man in the university bar. Cinna half-listens, all-absorbs. He is fascinated by Finnick and the very concept that beauty can win, so ruthlessly, in the midst of mud and gore. He watches, over and over, as Finnick’s deft hands weave nets, inescapable and unbreakable. He would dress Finnick in some delicate fabric, mesh and net. He would not parade him around, semi-naked, a slave to the Capitol’s perversions.

Cinna is eighteen. His hair remains short and his clothing is plain, a throwback to some holy man or unknown prophet, if such things ever existed. His one concession is gold eyeliner. It belongs to his mother and he finds it discarded on her dressing table one evening. Not all that glitters and all of that. It suits the Capitol well, he thinks, and he is of the Capitol, whatever about his unexpected, understated beginnings.

It is now that Cinna begins to contemplate the style of the Hunger Games and, with style, comes consideration of content. Years glide past, punctuated by the Games and twenty-three dead children (forty-six, sixty-nine, any grotesque denominator). He has never been concerned by Reapings and tesserae before but now he watches, avid. He does not know if he is seeking inspiration but he does know that he has never been so prolific. His clothes are in high demand in designer boutiques in the Capitol and, as ever, he blazes a trail apart from the current trends of dyed skin and prostheses. There are those at the height of fashion, with cows’ eyes and cats’ ears and they are too, too close to Muttations for Cinna’s liking.

Cinna does not change his muses. He discovers them.

Cinna loves the beautiful ones, the would-be Victors of seeming delicacy and screaming frailty, crushed and cut and destroyed. He loves it when his beautiful ones win. Annie Cresta, with her tenuous grasp on sanity. If he could, Cinna would dress her in scales and fins of diamonds and she would shimmer always. She would look like the ocean when she walks. It is a shame that her eyes are great pools of nothing now.

The more Cinna investigates the Hunger Games, the more enamoured he becomes. Not with the mechanics of it; he is no fan of brutality and blood. No, Cinna sees the potential in the Hunger Games. There is potential to produce an icon (a lynchpin, a catalyst, a hero). In these easy days of fascination, Cinna does not devote a single thought to the politics behind it. He is seeking the arrow or the tightened bow. He does not yet know the target.

It is only when he watched the 74th Reaping, in the final district, filled with impoverished miners and scrawny children with pot bellies, that he begins to understand. It is only when he sees Katniss Everdeen. It is only when he meets her. Mockingjay, she may be (too, too close to Muttations) but she is the catalyst and, for her, he creates fire.

**Author's Note:**

> +With immense thanks to Chelsey.  
> +The title comes from WB Yeats' "No Second Troy"


End file.
